Othello

If it doesn't happen a bit on its own, then assemble a documentary from 108 beloved short films and comment enthusiastically on their bravura and pioneering. But what does it matter when this stunningly photographed testimony to the era reliably takes your breath away with almost every frame. I commend the division into meaningful chapters and the commentary, which often makes clear in simple terms how to work with the image, space, and mood of the scene. The Lumières were right – if you have a camera, take it to the streets.

It's fascinating how many people can't find an excellent story unless a film explicitly tells them that it's telling one. In Jupiter's Moon there are dozens of suggestions and ideas in virtually every one of its long, incredibly composed takes. Yet nothing in it begs for your sympathy, the characters are confused, jaded, corrupt, and selfish, the refugee issue is not viewed in a purely one-sided way (we even get a terrorist attack), and it doesn't give answers. Only a vision of a torn, sodden continent, devoid of miracles, whose weakness has been exposed by the influx of convinced, head-high refugees fleeing destruction. I would have expected something this wild and radical from a 25-year-old director. Last year with Poland's The Last Family, this year with Hungary's Jupiter’s Moon, the Czech Republic really should hand in its filmmaking pass for the next ten years.

God, how I hate the world of Nancy Meyers. The rich folk they meet on the way home from the farmers' market, hysterically solving their generic problems over the banquet table, sitting in cars and taxis for half the film, from which they move to fancy restaurants where they talk about how they want to be loved even though there's nothing to love about them because they're endlessly superficial and interchangeable. The emptiness of the characters here is perfected, framed by the excruciating overacting of virtually everyone, and it's downright painful to watch how the initial characterization of the characters doesn't work, for example, when you don't think for a second that the jaded and oily Jack Nicholson is a progressive hip-hop producer who cavorted with Amanda Peet. It's suffused with an utter weariness of values that tells us there's no point in trying to break out of your box, and stepping outside of expectations defined by age or status is an unnatural act of playing at something you're not. Total condemnation. Barf.

A movie so moronic I'm embarrassed to look down on it. Collet-Serra is one of the best genre directors working today, and with his ideas and dynamism he practically always wrestles at least a mediocre experience out of utterly terrible screenplays. The same is true here, though I daresay he hasn't held such a monstrosity in his hand yet. My secret theory is that Collet-Serra doesn't read the scripts, but to save time he transcribes them image by image into technical scripts, and by extension storyboards. On page 109 he definitely no longer knows what page nine was about, or rather he probably doesn't even know what page 107 was about, but instead he's making up stuff about how people are going to be cutting themselves with axes and guitars in long digital shots, assisted by a flying camera, and I love him for that.

The great-grandfather of Howard Wolowitz and inventor of Clark Kent glasses, Christian easily vaults to the podium in the all-galactic competition for sleaziest movie character since forever, succeeding Star Wars: Episode II's Hayden Christensen. As soon as I heard the line "… because I stopped talking to you with words, but started talking to you with my heartbeat" all the walls had been breached and I spent the rest of it in the fetal position on the edge of my chair, biting my nails. Btw, if you have the slightest trace of feminist sensibilities, you're gonna have a bad time.

The cool thing is that if someone had made this twenty years ago as a soon-to-be sci-fi social satire, there would have been voices raised about how it pushes the envelope to the point of comical. Zvyagintsev formally arouses the hope that behind the blank expressions and hateful rants there's a personality that merely doesn't want to show itself, which is why we can barely see the phone screens everyone has their faces attached to and why most of the more intimate scenes are shot in large, shadowy long shots. As the film unfolds, however, this hope slowly fades. By the final reveal, the impenetrable shell of the characters is now definitively closed, not out of guilt but out of a rationalizing panic at taking on the responsibilities that stand in the way of their pursuit of the happiness they believe they are simply entitled to. Understandably, however, they will never find fulfillment even, if they get their way. Unlike many of his European filmmaking contemporaries, Zvyagintsev is a superb director who doesn't waste words and tells a story with images. He keeps the line of enquiry going through genre formal devices, often awakening false hopes. When the search team learns of a secret bunker of children in an abandoned building, we follow the long minutes of the search in a run-down recreation center, and by doing so the film suggests that this storyline is going somewhere. Similarly, when a character walks casually to a window and looks out into the landscape for a long time, with each passing second this shot raises the hope that the son they’re searching for will suddenly appear before her. I like the directorial ideas, like when a totally unknown character gives a total stranger a phone number during the exposition in the fancy restaurant, or the autopsy room door not opening; I like how the film doesn't let up. I'm not going for the maximum just because the film basically says the same thing with the first shot as it does with the last, but I might change my mind.

Scorsese's hyperactive, hysterical, episodic, and unrepentantly coked-up direction simply can't tighten up stories with fewer characters. Watching not particularly well sequenced scenes where four overacting actors scream wildly at each other can be tolerable, even enjoyable for subjective biopics covering the span of several years when basically all the characters are on drugs (Goodfellas, Casino). It's worse with the story of a middle-class family threatened by a relentless rapist, which takes place over the course of several days. Basically, it's a kind of frantic Schadenfreude filled with comical camera zooms, but despite my unbounded respect for the director, I have to admit that Cape Fear isn't much more than a cutely goofy snack.

If I had to quietly acknowledge after the first act that the world's longest-built joke had just been played on me, then afterward I had to become hoarse with disappointment that it wasn't intended to be and was merely a sophisticated narrative play where the entire first passage is spot-on in its form. Can you grasp the potential, to go to the effort of creating a half-hour slow, clinical, painful, silent sequence, only to then knock it down in one swoop? Unfortunately, Foxtrot can't rise above itself, though it tries terribly hard to pretend it can. It's terribly clunky and painfully literal and futile towards the end, and we have to pointlessly watch in long, static shots dialogue like "You're like an excavator. And I'm like a tow truck." "I actually think you're the excavator. And I'm the truck." Ugh.... PS: for those who think the Romanian New Wave is a good idea, this will be a treat.

It was almost palpable to feel my fabled generosity slipping away from me as the running time grew longer. A film in general is meant to be a representation rather than a description, no matter what historical variable it’s working with, so I don't mind the lavish begging for attention and auteur shortcuts. But I have a hard time with auteur extensions, and here they are not tactfully incorporated in any way; on the contrary, they are horrible, kitschily tasteless and easily exposed. Yes, I'm looking at you, you ten-meter braking distance on the tube between Piccadilly and Westminster stop. And you're not alone. It's clearly discernible from the outset that the character of the (of course) young, pretty secretary only exists in the film because the film is otherwise desperately lacking a female character (besides, her real-life counterpart didn't work for Churchill until a year later). The studio itself admitted that the scene in the tube was an offering to contemporary audiences who might not have filled the seats on the grounds that we're really just watching a story of old rich white men changing the world. That may be true, but it wasn’t my idea for you to make a film about 1940s British politics. Besides, the level of cheesiness of these injected scenes is a throwback to the wartime agitations where the crowd chants the hero's point of view in unison, underscored by the steady gaze of a cutely confident kid who will never let the country fall into enemy hands. To keep my pain at bay, the foreign posters have shielded themselves with a lengthy testimonial taken from a Washington Post review that reads: "The movie we need right now. This is the portrait of leadership at its most brilliant, thoughtful and morally courageous." But Churchill is far from a historically unambiguous, universally positive figure. As monumental as his contribution was to the outcome of World War II, many of his other historical moments are highly problematic, whether it be the Boer War, the management of the colonies, or his tendencies towards racism. An uncritical glorification of him as a lovable, stubborn commentator with plenty of human failings but his heart always in the right place is to some extent responsible for the current cult of the swashbuckling ruler with a minimum of empathy but plenty of witty catchphrases up his sleeve, the fruits of which we may have been enjoying here for years.

At certain moments, the uncomfortably familiar feeling of being lost, weary, and lonely during the grayest American winter in many years. It could perhaps be argued that the muted colors go a little too far in the overall bleakness of the film, but to its credit it is constant in its mood throughout and doesn't really offer any way out that would otherwise kind of belie itself. A surreal journey of several days to Chicago, where time stretches out into a seemingly endless black mass from which there is no escape, as all around is a frost-covered wasteland bordered by cones of car lights, is the Coen brothers' darkest period. "I'm tired. I thought I just needed a night's sleep but it's more than that."